Nobel Prizes in Economics started in 1969. The U.S. has won 61 times. The next highest number is England with 9. During that almost exact time period there has been, acording to the Rand Center, a "transfer" of wealth of approximately $50 Trillion Dollars from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1%. The people of the United States can't take any more Nobel Prize winners

@clumsydad7158

11 ай бұрын

wow, what a damning statistic, and an absurd skew ... they should rename it the nobel prize for hegemony

@BigHenFor

11 ай бұрын

Ditto for the UK too.

@littlejohn8100

11 ай бұрын

There is no Nobel Prize for Economics. There is a Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that pretends to be a Nobel Prize. I think economists are trying to create the illusion of scientific legitimacy with their fake "Nobel Prize". The profession of economics is a scam. Their job is to transfer wealth from the majority to the wealthy minority. That is why you are seeing the statistics you point out. Some economists like Mark Blyth step outside of this role and try to figure out what's really going on. These economists are worth paying attention to.

@wbafc1231

10 ай бұрын

There is no Nobel Prize for Economics. The Bank of Sweden created this fake Nobel price and by chance has been used to reward the worst neo-liberal BS artists possible. Obvious economics can not be seen as a real science in the same way as Chemistry or Physics.

@MrMarinus18

10 ай бұрын

Economics can also be a powerful tool to dehumanize marginalized people.

Economics (departments) were made to put out a certain point of view with endowment money. How could that go wrong ? Economists are the Southern Baptists of free thought.

@jgcelliott1

11 ай бұрын

They seem to frequently deliver the sales pitch for increasing wealth inequality. I wonder if the "endowment money" has anything to do with it. .

@samuelglover7685

11 ай бұрын

Disagree! The econ department at George Mason University is more like a brothel than any church. It does unfailingly services its owners, year after year.

@MrMarinus18

10 ай бұрын

I think the most important thing about the next generation is that they didn't grow up with the Soviet Union, they only ever read about it in text books. So I think they would take a less ideological stance. I also find the whole thing of government vs capitalism pretty silly.

@MrOliverwoods

10 ай бұрын

@@MrMarinus18 Economic theory has become mythical rather than about ideas. If colleges teach and promote one thing (free markets at the Chicago school) then it’s opposite idea will be ignored and the seekers of that truth will have to educate themselves while never gaining employment in their field (the Marxist wing of the Chicago school.) Economics are closer to theology than a science. Dedication to one idea is how you get Christians for Trump. Know what i mean ?

Rana Faroohar says she asked a trade policymaker how long it would take for the negative effects of a certain trade policy to dissipate for a particular community and was astonished by the answer: "three to five generations." 😟

@stephenphillips6245

11 ай бұрын

Holy cow

@stephenphillips6245

11 ай бұрын

Makes sense economies can't retool on a dime. Look at semi conductor factories switching from car chips to phone / computer chips...we are still suffering from under stock of new cars and prices soared. Can't change back those factories in a year... probably a decade.. LoL

@stephenphillips6245

11 ай бұрын

Golf Island Trust, government, policy is being overlooked...as to build more, sorta, affordable housing...so those islands water, soil and natural beauty will be sacrificed. One thing always costs another.

@_derpderp

11 ай бұрын

@@stephenphillips6245 Indeed. Less chips could mean more cars if the new automobiles weren’t driving office/lounge uplink pods, and were instead robust, efficient, safer…cars.

@stephenphillips6245

11 ай бұрын

@@_derpderp Interesting point...sensors on sensors (chips galore) to secure safety of thin light gas efficient vehicles instead of heavier stable transportation.

I definitely want to read this. A really good book is Philip Mirowski’s “the knowledge we have lost in information”. It explains radical shifts in post ww2 academic contemporary neoclassical economics. The term “artificial ignorance” is the last chapter. There is a good quote “fixing bad markets with more markets is just neoliberals never wanting to apologize”.

An excellent interview of what is a really important subject. George has nailed the systemic weaknesses in economic “analysis”. As a 70 year old applied mathematician I have had occasion to look in some detail at the work of winners of the pseudo Nobel Prize in economics out of curiosity for the depth of what they do. Because there are no controlled experiments in economics and you need a politician to implement some potentially bastardised version of the allegedly wonderful policy, there is never any real accountability for failure and George I think captures this with his analysis of counterfactuals. As for the use of the term “in the long run” which is a favourite of economists, it has both probabilistic and dynamical connotations. I will not bore readers with all the detail but suffice it to say when I hear an economist talk airily about the long run my eyes roll for the intellectual superficiality of the comment. You get a completely different vibe from people working on dynamical system stability in the context of celestial mechanics for instance.

@TheCommonS3Nse

11 ай бұрын

Look into the economic theories on Anwar Shaikh. He takes an engineering approach to the economy, in that he looked at the data first, then found the nuggets of economic wisdom that fit the data and developed his theories from there. I found his approach very good in contrast to the economists who come up with a theory of how the economy works, then “find” data which confirms their theories. Stephen Keen is another economist that takes this approach. The major problem, which you pointed out, is that there are no controlled experiments for economics. I’ve always felt like the Friedman types were essentially telling us that a bowling ball and a feather fall at the same rate, because that’s what the math tells us. But if you look into the real world data, the results are completely skewed because of other factors, or “noise” as the Austrians like to call it. Their solution is to eliminate the “noise” (by which they mean government intervention), rather than develop a model which incorporates the noise into its overall framework. Because of this, they will always fall into the No-true-Scotsman fallacy, where no economic system is ever representative of the pure vacuum conditions of their theories.

@Daniel_Zhu_a6f

10 ай бұрын

economical models also tend to have a lot of parameters, relative to the number of data points. it's not purely economics problem, but economists have a lot of arcane models that have very little meaning. for instance, take supply and demand: is it ok to assume that a curve that "tells equilibrium prices" changes every decade and is not very stable from economy to economy, let alone from sector to sector? it kind of sounds like an opposite of equilibrium, doesn't it? We are at a ridiculous time in history, when we can easily compute how many nails are needed for a building, but the economy is still driven by "an invisible hand". At a closer look, an invisible hand is just a corporate manager, half-assing, how large can be a price for an insulin stick, so that people would still prefer to pay for it, rather than die

George DeMartino eloquelently states why economics is not a science, you can't test the claims it makes.... “Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or exciting our sense of wonder.” - Carl Sagan

@tonywilson4713

11 ай бұрын

great quote There's a really good on in this talk. 13:40 _"When we generate more knowledge we also generate new domains of salient ignorance. When we learn something there are new things we need to know that we cannot know at the time that we've created the new knowledge."_

@tonywilson4713

11 ай бұрын

After Mark mentioned Karl Polanyi (as he likes to) I checked Goodreads where they have a bunch of his quotes and scanned for the word liberal. I am now wondering if Polanyi was a genius at observation of if he simply time travelled because some of his quotes read like they were said yesterday.

@stephm.3407

10 ай бұрын

And people accuse psychology of being a 'soft' science.

This seems to make an OVERWHELMING case for a Universal Basic Income! A perfect way for society to lay down a limit to the harm from economic disruption that it is prepared to tolerate ….

@steve-real

11 ай бұрын

I thought about that but if you really think about it. That might create more harm then good. And that’s the whole point of this podcast.

@rugbyguy59

11 ай бұрын

​@steve real But isn't that a case for trials to see the effect of the policy rather just leaping forward?

@TheCommonS3Nse

11 ай бұрын

I think there is a flaw in the UBI idea in that it assumes that the primary issue with our current work environment is a lack of sufficient remuneration. I think there is a strong case that it would help solve the Keynesian issue of maintaining a consumer base during economic downturns, but I don’t think it does anything to address the phenomenon pointed out by David Graeber as well as Anne Case and Angus Deaton. We are currently living in a situation where a lot of our jobs are either so under appreciated that they receive very little compensation, or they are make work projects which pay people well to do meaningless tasks. Both of these have the same problem, in that the workers no longer receive the social feedback which tells them they are a valuable member of society. They can be replaced at a moment’s notice with very little impact on the end product, hence they have become superfluous. A simple UBI would do nothing to address this issue, but I could see a UBI linked to something like a community service requirement, where your community involvement is compensated by the community in the form of a UBI. Something which affords people the opportunity to act in society and be deemed a valuable member of the community.

At my college to get a B.B.A in Finance you had to take some economics electives. I always did the worst in Economics now I’m happy, cause my intuition was trying to protect me. Out my Accounting, Finance, Marketing and Management classes I by far hated the economics ones the most. I wish I could have stoped at basic Macro and Micro; if I could go back in time I would have taken more accounting and management electives or pure mathematics.

@wbafc1231

10 ай бұрын

I studied "Econometrics" for a year. A yearsadly, that I can never get back. Utter nonsense. This was in the late 80's at the height of the neo-liberal takeover of Irish universities. I got "5%" in my test score. I am proud of that score.

Wow! Slap up side the head! This was irritatingly good. Sad, upsetting and made me angry. All it needed was a dance party at the end. Really, really good. Best podcast this month and I listen to a wide variety of them. Well done brothers. well done

@tonywilson4713

11 ай бұрын

Yeah I agree its maybe the best yet of these podcasts Mark has done. Even the ones he did a couple of years ago are good and worth watching but this one is great. 13:40 _"When we generate more knowledge we also generate new domains of salient ignorance. When we learn something there are new things we need to know that we cannot know at the time that we've created the new knowledge."_ That's a fairly profound observation.

That was a great talk. Favourite moment, the news of the movement towards a more empirical approach from younger economists... finally... the recognition that knowledge of social systems is always imperfect, and the adoption of a process to better manage that inherent imperfection... amazing.

@MrMarinus18

10 ай бұрын

But I also think there needs to be an acknowledgement of the limited value of economics to society. Sure economics matters but today it feels it have overtaken any and all priorities including spiritual morality, civil duty, solidarity and more. We do need to make the economy subservient to society once more.

I'm reminded of Krugman of all people admitting NAFTA probably did a lot more harm than anticipated, even after insulting people who were critical of it in the past.

@buzoff4642

10 ай бұрын

Which is evidence they should've stopped. Instead they kept going with the same tactics, dump food glut on China to kill the farmers' market, drive the farmers into cities for cheap labor, then ditch them for ever cheaper offshoring from China to Vietnam. The pretense they don't have test capacity is BS. They're ignoring the wreckage, as they scale up. Who in their right mind pretends they know enough to impact billions of people?

I think it's impossible not to do some harm when making economic policy, the problem is: who's getting the harm done to them... Many policies are often chosen or offered as a choice by those that will benefit from them, directly or indirectly. And also, sometimes we don't have the luxury of time to make a careful analysis and ponder what to do. That's why crisis are often an opportunist's wet dream, sometimes we need some luck to have people that are lucky enough to make the right policy choices.

@themsuicjunkies

11 ай бұрын

But the problem is that there is no recognition of the harm or the downsides.

@calexico66

11 ай бұрын

@@themsuicjunkies there rarely ever is... Either to avoid liability or reputation damage. Or just because it was mostly self serving. So the incentives are rarely aligned to make that kind of recognition. Although there are some historical cases when painful changes were defeated by those that had most to lose from them and history wasn't very kind with the outcome. The issue here is that policies established in the 1970s were mostly there to unravel the post war straightjacket on finance and corporations, in fact a back to the past kind of thing.

@surplusking2425

11 ай бұрын

Yes, we really need some luck to have leaders who chose right economic solutions.....like Vladimir Lenin 😂

@calexico66

11 ай бұрын

@@surplusking2425 like that's baiting, like Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Good enough for you or do you prefer fascist dictators?

He is the economist i wanted to be sixty years ago.... But, I wasn't bright enough to know that at the time.

Could you please interview the Norwegian economist Erik Reinert, he has talked about this for ages and payed a high price for it.

23:12 you know what this weirdly reminds me off... physicists in the 1040s and 50s and the professions response to the atomic bomb and to ww2

I basically reject the notion that economists are interested in a society's "best interest." There is an interest in APPEARING to be focused on enhancing the general welfare, sure. The actual active interest is in serving and maximizing wealth for the few, and thereby reaping the rewards courtiers to power have sought everywhere in every time. The dismal science, indeed.

@lynncurtner3486

11 ай бұрын

Spot on!

@jgcelliott1

11 ай бұрын

Cynicism is sometimes appropriate... because it is correct. .

@buzoff4642

10 ай бұрын

I've never ever heard economists have societies' best interests as any variable in their theories. Ever. Cite a single variable in GDP that includes the well being of the public.

Anybody who watched Inside job and the deleted scenes knew all about this and the chicago school and the powell memorandum.

@RikLeedsMusic.77

9 күн бұрын

Yep...the Chicago school is where it all culminated.

On the topic of economic consequences growing like an avalanche. It makes me think about Climate Change. There are economists, or people using the language of economics irresponsibly, claiming that more growth at the expense of the environment will allow us to compensate for the climate change. The fundamental presumption here seems to be the drastic climate change won't wipeout the fundamentals of that growth as it proceeds. Especially as much of the 'real growth' the construction of ports, factories, farmland, water intensive industries, are consolidated in vulnerable areas. All the while, the shifting variables of the climate are gathering momentum like a freight train.

This seems like a specific extension or particularised application of the harm of creation and dissemination of disinformation. Looking forward to listening 👍

What a great interview. There’s been some awesome guest speakers on this podcast. Nice one Mark

A quote from a Nobel economist who was President of the American Economics Association: Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions. Wassily Leontief

Economics: A best, a branch of psychology. At worst, a branch of theology.

@jgcelliott1

11 ай бұрын

At worst, outright quackery. .

We need more of this sort of thought! Grats

Nudge is about framing choices rather than leaving them open to randomness. Liberty to choose is still left in place to override the framework and go for bad options. The examples that followed the description of nudge theory were all mostly imposed and deemed inevitable by experts, as if economists were oracles.

Ripple in a Pond Vs. A full on, destructive Avalanche! Notice how quickly we “get” so much closer to the complex, systemic truth with the right metaphor. The person who owns the metaphor owns the story…

I have a doctorate in applied economics - less math. I appreciate the analytical thinking - trade offs and limited resources. I think that there are some threads of economic thinking that are useful esp in experimental economics but totally agree with the premise of the speaker here. A lot of nuance is packed into assumptions and economists don’t want to unpack them too much. The profession lacks the tools to do so.

"Who else gets to argue that the gains to the winners will be greater than the loss to the loser?"

Terrific!

So lucid. I love this stuff!

Great discussion, but it's too late. The power of oligarchic elites isn't responsive to reason or ethics.

Good discussion

58:00 a simple 'pile on'? - pylon against the field?

Economics is the secular theology of the modern world. In as much as before the industrial revolution, religion was the chief ideology in how kingdoms and states attempted to govern themselves and interact with each other: it was an actual political power structure, if not the primary political power. . However, economics is the opposite of a physical science in that the more advanced it gets, the less realistic it is.

"We oversold them" and they felt that they had reason to "buy" it!

why are small countries with disciplined public spending so preferred as residence?

@TheCommonS3Nse

11 ай бұрын

First off, small countries need to have disciplined public spending, because they don’t have the economic weight to float their own currencies. But that being said, what metric are you using to assume that people prefer these small countries for residence? Has there been an influx of emigration to these small nations? Is there a marked decline in the people emigrating to larger countries with larger debts?

@nkristianschmidt

11 ай бұрын

@@TheCommonS3Nse Yes, compared to capacity, there is high demand ( and thus pricing ) to live in places like Dubai, Singapore, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, Andora, Monaco, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Georgia ( before the war 2022, now mostly Russian demand ), Switzerland and even Hong Kong from people who are free to choose. The high prices indicate a need for more such countries.

@TheCommonS3Nse

11 ай бұрын

@@nkristianschmidt What you're describing doesn't sound like a viable solution for most countries. A small nation with high real estate costs and low taxes is also known by another name. A tax haven. Not every nation can be a tax haven. Most people aren't going to be able to move there, since they have strict immigration standards and a high cost of residency. But the people that will move there are the people who can afford it and stand to benefit the most from liberal tax policies, ie. the wealthy. Due to their small population, the government expenses are drastically reduced, and they have plenty of foreign wealth coming in with the new immigrants, therefore they are able to operate with very low taxes. The low population will also make their immigration rate look much larger, despite the fact that the overall numbers are nowhere near the millions of immigrants going to larger debt laden nations like France, America and Canada. For example, Canada added approximately 440,000 immigrants in 2022. That's more than the entire population of the Bahamas at 407,000. In the face of that fact, it's hard to say with a straight face that more people are choosing to move to places like the Bahamas and not to countries with higher taxes.

@nkristianschmidt

11 ай бұрын

@@TheCommonS3Nse per capita, and supply and demand

@TheCommonS3Nse

11 ай бұрын

@@nkristianschmidt To stick with the countries I have already brought up, Bahamas has a net immigration rate of 2.5 per 1000 people. Canada has a net immigration rate of 6.0 per 1000. Canada's net immigration rate PER CAPITA is over twice that of the Bahamas. It also has an out of control real estate market, so the demand is there as well. Your argument isn't holding up very well against the data.

They are also not taught about services like transit and parks and bike lanes that cannot be created by the profit motive. They do not understand that they form part of a system that is synergistic. For example, good transit can lower the total cost of transport even after an increase in taxes and subsidies.

I suppose it involves what variables are defined and how they are measured.

@buzoff4642

10 ай бұрын

He's saying they don't actually look at the outcomes. And that's not science.

Dr Blyth mentioned a book on Russia from 2013 earlier. Anyone know the name for it?

@surrealistidealist

11 ай бұрын

I have the same question. If I find it, I'll let you know.

@Lampredi4

11 ай бұрын

@@surrealistidealist thx bro

@Lampredi4

11 ай бұрын

@@headcrusher1966 many thanks

Mark where is your newest book, Boomers the Worst Generation? Been waiting with baited breath for some time. I hope it comes out soon.

Can anyone tell me, what is a successful practical application of economics on the scale of penicillin, or the steam engine, or aqueducts? Not finance, not arithmetic, specifically economics. Thank you for your kind consideration.

@clumsydad7158

11 ай бұрын

economics is made by the law makers who are the politicians following the oligarchs

@gordondavies7773

11 ай бұрын

The New Deal... so successful it took the market fundamentalists 40 years to reverse...and they only did so when white voters realised that New Deal policies might merge with Civil Rights policies and benefit African Americans. Add to that the mistrust of government engendered by the disastrous policy of Vietnam. A disastrous combination of racism and hippy anarchism opened a gap for Regan and the great transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

@BigHenFor

11 ай бұрын

Difficult, because the discipline morphed over time. It was originally Political Economy - which is incidentally Mark Blyth's discipline. Personally, I've only dipped my toe into the field but what I can only conclude is that it's most useful form is Political Economy, because it is the most immediately relatable. If politics is about "how we decide who gets what", then Political Economy looks at that process often with a critical eye, because it looks at how the power to decide shapes economic - as fiscal and monetary policy - and it's political and social consequences. The theoretical stuff is so arcane, that I fear that that branch of economics was shaped by less a concern for human welfare than the need to be accepted as A Science, and the fallacy that human activity is driven by objective, predictable, and managed in a mechanistic sense. As a human institution the economy is anything but that. It's a complex system, and heavily influenced by psychology, as John Maynard Keynes himself acknowledged. But... It must be said that the wealthy and the powerful shaped the profession, by dint of their endowments, to serve their needs and concerns above all. They wanted to control human economic activity as if they could control a factory, and so the theoretical graphing, and equations while useful in some contexts, tend to rarify and objectify human behaviour. And looking from the financial perspective, it is telling that no economist has become a billionaire unless they go into finance. Even Keynes lost money in the stock market. Lol. It is a bit of a cult in someways, and we're encouraged to take their word that they know what they're doing. But the results tell a different story. The profession to a large extent has lost its way, because as long as they keep serving power they can publish, and get a nice job, and even get a government job. Not even Adam Smith would recognise it now. And since 2008, the profession has been split between the High Church Orthodoxy of neoclassical economics and the Low Church Coalition of Marxist, social economists, and the other social sciences who critique the Ivory Tower mentality. They understand that just based on results, the profession is sociopathic in its insistence on ignoring the consequences of their often ideologically-driven selective ignorance of the damage they have done. And even worse, they're getting rewarded for it. See some of the videos of Gary Stephenson at the Garyseconomics channel, where a former City of London trader takes a Masters degree in Economics at Oxford University, and it's shocked at how out of touch his professors are. And recent events in the UK how power and economics can work together to crash the economy. But, economics is not finance, is it? 😅

@clumsydad7158

11 ай бұрын

@@BigHenFor nearly perfectly stated

@clumsydad7158

11 ай бұрын

​@@BigHenFor finance is what ... using money to make money, a form of investing and business decision making, and risk management, but overall it's about who has the authority to control money and reconsolidate/reconform system as needed under varying political circumstances ... and i guess the other classic definition is it brings value from the future into the present, that it provides money by tapping future income flows. that part seems like it could be value neutral, but debt often seems to fall into an oppressive regime or a manipulated regime. i always have a vague idea in the future we'll rework this and have more of a system of abundance, where instead of value from the future we'll have value from the past, like one is born with credits instead of the prospects of debts. but maybe there are deep psychological reasons why this cannot yet be the case, or maybe it's just political reasons, or probably both.

11:15 its like saying the fact that your apartment building collapsed isn't my fault i gave you the plans its not my fault if you didn't build it to the nanomectic tolerances i designed it to ... or showing a 7 year old how to operate a complex bit of machinery 1 time and then saying its not my fault he lost his arm i showed him how to do it right and i guess he didn't listen ..

I'm not convinced that economics is actually any type of science. The basic requirement of science is to test your hypotheses and then - critically - to discard those hypotheses that are shown to be wrong. I've yet to see much evidence that economics does this.

@buzoff4642

10 ай бұрын

They claim no opportunity to test. They just aren't looking at "those left behind", or damage to influx. - offshoring the Carolinas' textile work - the Rust Belt, Detroit, etc. - the impact on Haiti, Puerto Rico of moving work into Haiti, Puerto Rico - NAFTA, dumping food glut onto Mexico wiping out their farms/farmers for industry's use as workers

@RikLeedsMusic.77

9 күн бұрын

bingo...it's actually pseudo-science.

When as the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", why don't we hear about who went up the road, ie good intentions are necessary to at least indicate the wrong road?

I don't think the diagnosis is entirely correct. I am working as a government economist and while cost-benefit analysis is used it is not the only or even the most important element in a decision. What the author talks about towards the end is that he wants better policy making with stakeholder engagement - nobody can disagree with that but I don't think he really knows how (micro) policy is actually made. The real harm economics does is through the unthinking application of some of its core (neoliberal) tenets at the macro level, in defence of free trade, markets, etc. and against government intervention in principle.

Will people be nudged into what's best for them or the elites. This story has is already written.

it's good if you're inside the veil of privilege, and not under the umbrella of exploitation

39:31 yeah .. we...did soeme ...very bad things....

Regardless of The use of the word "Liberalism" has been problematic, since the end of the 18th century, because it's use has been so terribly perverted, everywhere where memory of life under religious monarchy has faded. Today, almost every non-economist "feel" that "liberalism" and "neoliberalism" are intricately related to one another. They are not, in any real sense. In an overriding sense they both attack the prevailing social hierarchy, but those base situations are unrecognizable from their respective positions!

Economics isn't science. It's a professional rules lawyer that explain what the rules say is supposed to happen according to made up rules.

Dangerous... That's the last word👍 and that sum it up in 1 word. Let's call a spade is a spade, why hanging onto economist as a profession with all these false claims, after all the insights, still defending the economists and trying to patch up what is wrong and no apology for the harm they did to the world. Why look in details now and all based on wrong initial wrong assumption, that's a logical fallacy. I think 'hanging on' just answered the initial question on why so sensitive and defensive 😂 defending economics as science.

36:25 or the heat death of the universe lol

"does Economics..(yadda..)" ......"Does Economics......." ?? (uhh,no) "Do Economics..." (ahh,yes)

His plan at the 35 min. mark is deeply flawed, because it doesn't grok that the rich have the political power to ignore the harm to the mass of the people. So, why would they change their behavior? IMO, most economists have sold their soul to the rich and so do the bidding of the rich. MMTers are an exception.

On the infrastructure front, economists in the English speaking countries certainly cause problems. They are from the upper middle class and have no idea or interest in what types of investments are needed in the daily lives of the bottom 80 percent. Especially so if they are giving generic advice without intimate knowledge of a particular sector.

economics is a science for which there is no field, or application. society is run by powerful people. they parcel out the rewards in whatever way seems to benefit themselves. only in a genuine democracy are the 'powerful people' in the majority, economists can be useful in such a society, the public are likely to want an efficient management of resources. and there's the problem: no such democracy* when economists work for elites, they are under pressure to make decisions which benefit the rulers at the expense of the nation. usa is a visible sample of this reality. the economy is a mess. many economists contribute to making the mess. or they retreat to academia. *i will credit helvetia with being a proto-democracy, no more. they are still ruled by politicians.

Economists sit in their professor closet, and dont speak out enough. Where it can influence policy. In addition, when Mark spoke to Congress he stepped outside his closet and tried influence our Economic policy.

I'm not sure the speaker or host have a proper grasp on randomised control trials, or how they could possibly be used in economics in order to do "science". For a start, you are going to need to be able to randomly sample from a population. Of what? Countries? Regions? Businesses? Individuals? I'm pretty sure unless it's one of the latter two, the experiment design would be an absolute joke. Or can one randomly choose Belgium for our control group and randomly choose Switzerland and call it a day?

Exonomics never should have separated from the social sciences and hit its nadir with the Chicago School’s pro-rich, BS impure and unapplied math. The top journals are still controlled by these bogus mathematicians despite the failure of formal or computer models of GET and similar free market models. Innovation, science, lead in the air, politics matter. The catastrophic pathology of old economic is it does not fully encompass causes unlike say a shielded physics experiment. So lead causes crime that lowers housing values but airborne lead is not in their models. The Nobel prizes before Kahneman were jokes for false or already discovered phenomenon (eg TV executives found Granger Causation and 17th century insurers rejected Black-Scholes). There is a happy side. A new generation of experimental and anthropological economists are changing the discipline making amazing discoveries (the Michael Scott effect predicts poor economies, inheritance causes most inequality). This is a very exciting time to enter exonomics and displace the zombies.

Economics pretends to be a science. It is not.

First of all, economics is not "science". The ivory tower is frequently besotted with its own arrogance. .

haha imagine thinking economics isnt 99% just generating facile justifications to maintain the status quo power structure...

The United States is strewn with dead malls and half empty shopping centers

@stevefitt9538

11 ай бұрын

Yeah. likely the result of the workers having no extra money to spend. and Walmart coming to town.

@macrosense

11 ай бұрын

There is an old Chris Rock joke: there are two kinds of malls. Malls where white people shop. And malls where white people used to shop. As it is, the U.S. has about 7 times the retail space per person as Western Europe. There are certain tax laws and accounting rules that incentivize that trend and conclusion. KZread channel The Proper People, and a few others, does a great job of filming vacant malls, factories, hospitals, and school buildings.

@macrosense

2 ай бұрын

Our accounting and tax rules and overall economic policies generally favor building more of them.

Is it really free trade to lose a job making underwear then need to buy cheaper underwear from somewhere else while the same owners make more profit?

There is nothing scientific about blaming your subjects of study as irrational, when your theory fails. That's 1800s' pontificating arrogance, which is ignorance with a strong overlay of unfounded confidence. The harm done vastly exceeds the examples cited. One third of US youth, those under 35 years old, are economically shelved as unemployed, living with parents. India's new economy participants are now facing infertility, joining the rest of the westernized, childless. China, like Mexico, disabled their farmers by importing food glut to kill their market, to use them as industry labor, in cities, separating them from their kids in far off provinces, only to be ditched when offshoring to even cheaper Vietnam. 2008 was no accomplishment, as rather than have Wall St's malice concentrated preceding the Depression, the malice extended over a far broader region of the planet. Influence, capable of global wreckage, is power. No different than lobbyists' "influence" in Washington.

Economics = 1/2mv(soft science garbage)^2

AI is too dangerous but not because it threatens humanity but because its much more a hype then a reality. Auto industry is for 30 years trying to put AI into cars and couldnt make anything better then stupidest driver ever alive. Recently became known that in Tesla many more countless incidents and customer complaints with AI driver were wiped off from official documentation